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November 16, 2018 — Does the floral motif, so frequent throughout the history of art, still have a place in contemporary art? As a matter of fact, it did recur in a couple of Montreal exhibitions of the spring and summer of 2018. If one of these gathered artists in several mediums under this theme, this motif will be dealt with here by dwelling on two other ones, that afforded the local public an overview of the body of floral work that secured photographer Linda Rutenberg’s international reputation…

March 1, 2017 — A retrospective of ninety-five black-and-white photographs by Jean-François LeBlanc was recently exhibited at Maison de la culture Côtes-des-Neiges, presenting a look back at a fertile decade of life in Montreal beginning in the mid-1980s…

January 20, 2016 — We received two long letters to the editor, by Hannah Claus and by Lori Beavis, written in reaction to Bénédicte Ramade’s essay on the exhibition The Rebel Yells: Dress and Political Re-dress in Contemporary Indigenous Art, published in issue 101 of the magazine (autumn 2015).

November 26, 2015 — I have been reading Ciel variable since 1996. A while ago, its editor-in-chief, Jacques Doyon, asked me to write an essay, destined for the Archives section of the magazine’s website, that would demonstrate “the importance of the magazine as a medium and space of exploration for photography.” And so, over the past few weeks, I have been re-reading…

November 18, 2015 [originally published Winter 2015] — Vincent Lafrance’s work is permeated with the idea of the simulacrum – perception and its faults. Playing with photographic virtuosity and with randomness, he composes visual illusions with traditional photographic means. His body of videographic work uses language as a confusing effect; he produces fictions that fluidly meander between …

November 12, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — MaryAnn Camilleri is the executive director of the Magenta Foundation. After completing her BA in photographic arts at Ryerson University, Toronto­ born Camilleri moved to New York, where she worked at Magnum Photo for ten years. In 2003, she returned to Toronto and, with the goal of publishing high­-quality art books and promoting Canadian photographic artists, she started up Carte Blanche…

November 14, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — The book is a collection of essays on contemporary art history written by Pontbriand between 2000 and 2011 (other than the new writing undertaken to contextualize and draw together the at times disparate essays). It is a personal reflection upon and an example of an early-twenty-first-century sensibility that we experience collectively…

November 21, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — Vera Frenkel, a monograph published last year by German art book publisher Hatje Cantz, offers the most comprehensive study of this Canadian multidisciplinary artist’s work to date. Remarkable for its reach, the book includes twelve essays focused on nine projects completed over a forty-year span, …

December 17, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — The rich-text title CounterIntelligence that introduces an exhibition, writings, workshop, and film screenings considers two cultural nodes and production modes – art and military activity. The project’s formal and thematic eclecticism befits the Berlin-based Canadian curator, Charles Stankievech, whose own work traverses the fields of sound and visual art, writing, and publishing…

December 18, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — Karen Irvine, curator and museum associate director at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, recounted that it was after seeing Sohei Nishino’s work in Korea in 2010 and reading Rebecca Solnit that she had the idea for the Of Walking exhibition. Nishino is one of eight international contemporary artists whose works were in the show…

January 7, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — Stan Douglas’s earlier productions include Every Building on 100 West Hastings (2001), a nocturnal panorama of a block of buildings situated in a poor Vancouver neighbourhood, and the series of four photographs Crowds & Riots (2008), depicting recon­structions of crowd scenes and riots that took place in Vancouver during the twentieth century…

January 9, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — I travelled to Quebec City to see Serge Clément’s exhibition Constellations on a snowy Sunday afternoon in April. I had little prior knowledge of the show, presented at VU, centre de diffusion et de production de la photographie from March 21 to April 20, 2014, save for its basic idea: to showcase Clément’s collection of photobooks…

January 14, 2019 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — Henri Venne is a painter. It is painted matter that interests him. It is in this medium that he was educated, and it is also how he defines himself. Henri Venne is also a photographer, as the works that emerge from his creative process are photographs. He is also interested in how images are imbued with visual effects, places for various reflections…